The FlatHDTV Blog

The high-definition DVD format wars have finally come to an end, with the Blu-Ray format edging out HD-DVD. With striking similarity to a U.S. political party nomination race, Blu-Ray won because the big industry players decided it would do a better job supporting their content. All parties are now relieved that the race is over, since the movie studios don’t have to decide which format to burn their movies onto, and consumers don’t have to decide which type of player to buy.

Predictably, though, the end of this competition has brought an end to the dropping prices. Most dedicated Blu-Ray players have spiked in price at least 20%, some much more. It may be some time before the competition between different brands of Blu-Ray player forces the price back down again.

For now, it seems that one of the factors in HD-DVD’s demise is still relevant, but in a different way: Sony’s popular game console, the Playstation 3, doubles as a high quality Blu-Ray disc player, and it isn’t participating in the price spike. It’s not much more expensive than the cheapest dedicated player, and it plays games, too.

Check here for more details, and check out FlatHDTV.net for more information on the world of HDTV.

Just this week, Toshiba has announced that it will no longer support the HD-DVD format of high definition DVD technology, which it had been developing. This means that the only option for high definition DVD watching is the Blu-Ray format, and consumers will no longer have to choose between two very similar but incompatible formats. It’s good news for the movie industry, too, since they can now focus on only one format to produce their high definition movies in, and will not have to risk choosing an unpopular format.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were equally matched at first, so there was no clearly better technology. Consumers had a hard time choosing which format to invest in, and so did the studios. Each format depended almost completely of the support of the major studios, so when big ones like Warner Brothers chose to support Blu-Ray exclusively, it was only a matter of time before HD-DVD went down. Another big factor was the popularity of the Sony Playstation, which doubles as a Blu-Ray player.

(source)

At the beginning of January, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players were selling at about the same rate. But on January 4, Warner Bros. announced that it would only be supporting the Blu-Ray format in its high definition DVD sales.

Then, the sales of high definition DVD devices shifted drastically toward Blu-Ray (in the second week of January, it outsold HD-DVD by 93% to 7%!) Coincidence?

Sources:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/01/22/blu.ray.hw.dominates.hddvd/

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/01/04/warner.blu.ray.exclusive/

Having trouble deciding which kind of DVD player to hook up to your new HDTV? There are currently four main categories of DVD player available, and they will all work with any HDTV. There are some subtle differences between the types, though.

There are two main types of DVD disc: standard and hi-def. The standard type is the one we’re all familiar with- you might have several hundred of these in your video library. Standard DVDs are all recorded with a picture resolution of 480i, which means the picture has 480 lines of resolution and it’s interlaced. Hi-Def DVDs are recorded with a resolution of 720p, 1080i or 1080p. The major movie studios are now rushing to re-record their movies onto one of the competing hi-def formats. More on this later.

1. Standard DVD Players:

Since standard DVDs are 480i and your HDTV screen displays 720 or 1080 lines of resolution progressively, the content must be de-interlaced and upscaled to fit. The HDTV can do these tasks, so a basic standard DVD player that you bought 10 years ago should work just fine! But, there are differences in the quality of the de-interlacer and the upscaler built into different HDTV sets. So, sometimes those devices are built into the DVD player.

2. De-Interlacing (Progressive) DVD players:

The de-interlacing process is tricky, and sometimes the HDTV doesn’t do such a good job with it, even though the overall quality of the set is high. A bad de-interlacer will make the picture look a little jumpy, blurry or full of extra pixels that flicker in and out. So, if you want to keep up with the latest de-interlacing technology, it might be easier and cheaper to upgrade your DVD player rather than your HDTV.

3. Upscaling DVD Players:

The upscaling process is not quite as tricky, but there are still noticeable differences in quality between different sets. If you happened to buy an HDTV with a poor upscaler, you can really improve the quality of your DVD watching with a good upscaling player.

4. High Definition DVD Players:

And finally, a whole new standard of resolution is starting to emerge in the DVD world: high definition DVD. There are currently two competing formats, called HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, which are essentially the same but require different players and are not compatible with each other. Check the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray categories of this blog to learn more. Fortunately, both of these are backwards-compatible with standard DVDs: if you buy one type of hi-def player but you feel that you made the wrong choice, at least you will still be able to play older DVDs.

Mempile, an optical storage technology company in Israel, has developed a way to store up to 500 GB of data on a regular sized DVD disc. This is about 10 times as much data as a regular Blu-Ray disc, and could store over 100 regular DVD movies, 10 high definition movies, or half a million large Word documents. With future optimization techniques, they believe they will be able to fit 1,000 GB, or 1 Terabyte, on a disc.

This is basically done by slicing the data layers into 100 or more microscopically thin sections, each of which holds as much data as a regular DVD.

Whether or not this technology would have an impact on the DVD industry, though, is not clear. What would a movie studio do with the extra 950GB when they sell you a movie for $29.95? They probably won’t put 19 extra movies on the disc. Perhaps by the time the TeraDiscs are ready for the market, we will figure out a use for all that memory.

Source: Mempile

The battle goes on. On August 20, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation announced that they will only be releasing future DVDs in the HD-DVD format, and will drop support for Blu-Ray. According to Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks, one of the main reasons for the switch is the lower price of HD-DVD players.

Now, Warner Bros. is the only major studio producing DVDs in both formats. Source: CNN Money.com.

The battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray goes on, and the biggest developments are happening at the retail level. Here are the latest developments for each format:

HD-DVD:
-Microsoft has dropped the price on its HD-DVD add-on to the Xbox 360 game consoles, from $199 to $179, and will be offering free movies in August and September. See here: Xbox Newsflash

-Toshiba’s newest laptop, the Qosimo G45-AV680, will have an HD-DVD-R feature, allowing you to burn HD content on a 30GB HD-DVD recordable disc. And the laptop display has a resolution of 1920 x 1200, enabling viewing of full 1080p content.

Blu-Ray:
-Blockbuster Video has decided that, out of the two high-def formats, they will only stock Blu-Ray titles in the future.

-Target will only stock Blu-Ray players in its stores, although it will stock the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and some HD-DVD discs.